At Front Row CRM we believe in the sales rep and built a CRM from the ground up as a mobile system. This allows the sales rep to complete and submit sales reports in less than 60 seconds from any mobile device, leaving more time for selling. We have added features to help the sales reps be more productive and improve compliance, including data and information retrieval, note review, location and directional maps, contact information, camera integration, sync with Outlook or Google PIM and more.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

6 Ways to Provide AMAZING Customer Service During the Holiday Rush

Today’s customers have unreasonably high service expectations - even more so during the holiday rush. The last thing you want is to let the quality of your customer service slip during the most important time of the year.
In order to shine amidst the clutter of promotions and maximize your
holiday efforts, your support team needs to provide superior customer
service.
At Desk.com, we talked to some of the support managers taking on the
holidays this year to understand how they empowered their teams to
provide amazing customer service. Through a series of interviews with
them and our WOW team members, we gathered six effective strategies that
all holiday heroes should use to prepare for the peak seasons:

1. Plan Ahead

You should consider planning at least three months before peak
periods. This time is needed to determine personnel needs, training, and
if necessary, schedule longer shifts for existing employees. Planning
ahead and setting goals is essential - especially for fast-growing
companies that have experienced rapid customer growth in the previous
months.
Fortunately, some simple reporting and forecasting efforts can really
go a long way to determine how much personnel and tools you need on
hand for the peak seasonal demand. There is a wide set of factors that
you should consider analyzing in order to effectively forecast the
holiday season.
Desk.com’s customers paid special attention to these key points:

Consider the cost of hiring seasonal workers compared to training team members from different departments

Make an educated forecast of how many customer inquiries you will receive this year

2. Divide and Conquer: Triaging Customer Interactions

One of the biggest mistakes you can make during the holidays is not
providing a process for your support team to efficiently and effectively
handle all of the cases. Unfortunately, an inbox full of hundreds of cases that grows by the hour has the ability to slow any agent down. An effective process that keeps agents productive is “triaging” - a strategy that gives all cases quick, instant attention.
Triaging cases as they come in allows you divide and conquer your
case load by having the right cases, assigned to the right teams, right
away. By gauging the urgency of a case and correctly categorizing it by
the type of help the customer needs, you’re ensuring the right agents
are handling the customer’s question. This prevents specialized agents
from wasting time digging through cases looking for the ones that most
require their subject matter expertise.
Desk.com customer, SmugMug, says this about triaging cases:

"Triaging cases makes all the difference during the holidays. It's
necessary to triage for cases and set up special filters. In order to
efectively triage incoming customer interactions, we use Case Filters a
lot in Desk.com."

3. Improve Self-Service Support

It’s no secret that the holidays are a time of high case volumes and
even higher emotions. The best way to keep both at bay is to provide
customers with the resources they need to solve their own questions. You
can serve more customers faster simply by making answers to common
questions readily available to them through an online support center.
Most customers prefer to solve their own problems anyways! According to
Forrester, 72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support
issues over picking up the phone or sending an email.
A Holiday FAQ is an incredible resource for customers
and has the potential to dramatically deflect calls or emails -
meaning, holiday shoppers do not need to contact your support team
because they have solved their own problem using the FAQ.
Consider some of the following questions for your Holiday FAQ:

What are your work hours during the holidays?

Did you recently release a new version of a product during the holidays? What’s different about it from the older version?

Are there any discount codes available? Explain the fine print.

What are the shipping policies?

What are your return/exchange/ cancellation policies?

Do you have any rush order options?

4. Empower Agents to Get the Job Done

We’ve all been in that situation when a holiday order somehow goes
terribly wrong. It might have been lost in transit or arrived three
sizes too small. In which case, having a problem resolved in the
shortest amount of time in a friendly and personalized fashion has the
greatest impact on a customer’s holiday experience.
In order to deliver amazing customer service in the shortest amount
of time during the holidays, you should consider empowering your agents
to solve customer problems at all costs. By giving agents trust and
confidence to make their own judgment, they will be able to deliver a
fast, personalized customer experience without having to jump through
any hoops. A team of support agents that deliver a fun and fast customer
experience has the potential to be a huge competitive advantage during
the holidays.
Desk.com customer, Bonobos has created a positive reputation for
their company because of the amazing customer service that they provide.
Here is what Senior Support Manager, Cole Sickler said about why they
empower their agents:

By empowering our staff to do whatever they want to satisfy a
customer they can jump to a workable solution immediately without having
to get clearance or jump through any hoops."

5. Focus on Fast Resolution Times

Many customer service managers will advise that the biggest
efficiency metric to focus on is an immediate first response time.
Setting goals to reach a customer as soon as possible is a great way to
make them happy because it assures them that support is reachable.
However, bear in mind your team could consist of agents that pick up a
phone within two rings or average an hour response time via email. But,
if they require multiple contacts over a period of 2-3 days to solving
each case, then your agents might not be as effective as you thought.
There are several ways to twist the gears to make sure agents can solve cases as fast as possible:

As mentioned earlier, triaging cases allow agents to quickly respond
to easy, one-touch-resolution cases and escalate the higher priority
ones that require more time and patience.

Desk.com customers love using Macros to
get simple questions answered fast and effectively. It’s also easy to
train cross functional teams on which macros to apply where.

Actively respond to cases with links to your knowledge base giving
customers the opportunity to solve their own issue. HINT: This can be
automated with Desk.com’s Macros.

As also mentioned earlier, empower agents to solve cases at all
costs. Rather than creating a bottleneck filled with cases that have not
been resolved due to agents asking permissions from their managers,
give them the freedom and resources to make the customer happy.

6. Activate Whole Company Support

Rather than spending time and money on seasonal workers, consider
activating whole company support - or cross-training fellow colleagues -
for the busy holiday season. Whole company support provides more
personnel that require little training as well as allows your system to
be more resilient to the stress that will undoubtedly be experienced
during the peak season.
First, you should equip all of your colleagues to answer basic
questions customers may have (refer to the Holiday FAQ previously
discussed). Then set up an escalation procedure for common situations
that require additional steps or expertise from full-time agents. This
tactic is particularly useful on busy days like Black Friday and the day
after Christmas when all hands need to be on deck.
With basic training and some guidance, you can stack your support
team with more personnel and make sure each customer receives a fast and
personal response.

In Conclusion

Тhe holidays are a stressful time for everyone - shoppers,
retailers, service providers, and especially customer support agents!
It’s important to remember, though, that at the end of the day, most of
the insanity is being done to bring a smile to someone’s face.

About Front Row CRM

Front Row Solutions is an innovative CRM sales tool that utilizes sales reporting applications and maps to increase productivity and revenue. Sales will see an immediate benefit in commissions and ease of use. Managers see real time reports, statistics and activity that is meaningful. www.FrontRow-Solutions.com